BOOKS; A Shaper of the Canon Gets His Place in It

By CHARLES McGRATH

Published: October 7, 2007

CORRECTION APPENDED

Correction Appended

THE latest inclusion in the Library of America, that clothbound hall of literary fame, is two big volumes of Edmund Wilson's critical writings. It's about time, considering that the Library of America was Wilson's idea in the first place. He modeled it after the French Pl?de series, insisting back in the 1960s that the texts be readable and accessible, without a forest of footnotes, and it was he who chose the volumes' pleasingly compact format. Wilson also thought that the library ought to be highly selective, and he would not be amused to learn that he got in only after the likes of Philip K. Dick and H. P. Lovecraft, about whose work he once wrote, ''The only real horror in most of these fictions is the horror of bad taste and bad art.''

Wilson, who was born in 1895, was that rare thing in America, an all-purpose man of letters, but he never entirely got over the ambition of wanting to be a poet or novelist. He probably would have preferred that the Library of America first bring out ''Memoirs of Hecate County,'' his novel based in part on a long affair he had in the 1920s with a taxi dancer, Frances Minihan. Among his many books this was Wilson's favorite, and it's also the only one of his books that became a best seller. (That ''Hecate County'' was banned for a while because of its sexual frankness did nothing to hurt its popularity.)

But Wilson's lasting claim on us was as a critic, though he hated the term and preferred to call himself a journalist. For five decades he published lucid and magisterial essays on whatever caught his interest, whether it was books, politics or 16th-century garden sculpture. He was like his idol Jules Michelet, someone who had read all the books, looked at all the monuments and pictures and had it all under his hat.

So it's appropriate that the first two Library of America volumes should collect Wilson's literary essays and reviews from the '20s, '30s and '40s. The volumes include ''Axel's Castle,'' the book-length study that introduced an entire generation to literary modernism, and ''The Wound and the Bow,'' whose psychological studies of Kipling, Dickens, Hemingway and Joyce helped refurbish and deepen the reputations of those writers.

Some of his most thrilling stuff, though, is the literary journalism he did for Vanity Fair and The New Republic. Wilson was just a young man then, barely out of Princeton, with a couple of years' seasoning as a medic in World War I, and he seemingly took every assignment that came his way. He wrote about burlesque shows, for example, judging that the Minsky Brothers Follies was superior to Ziegfeld's because the girls had bigger breasts and shapelier legs, and he wrote more than once about Houdini, whom he admired as ''an audacious and independent being, whose career showed a rare integrity.''

He also reviewed all the new books of the period, which meant that he was writing an early draft of literary history. He wrote the first American review of ''The Waste Land,'' even before T. S. Eliot added the notes, and one of the first reviews of ''Ulysses.'' He was among the first critics to make a substantial case for Yeats as a major poet.

Wilson was also a pioneering supporter of Ernest Hemingway and of his friend and fellow Princetonian F. Scott Fitzgerald, about whom he wrote in 1922: ''He has been given imagination without intellectual control of it; he has been given the desire for beauty without an aesthetic ideal; and he has been given a gift for expression without many ideas to express.'' (Fitzgerald agreed.) But then he writes of ''This Side of Paradise'' that it ''commits almost every sin that a novel can possibly commit; but it does not commit the unpardonable sin: it does not fail to live.''

As criticism written in the moment, without the benefit of hindsight, this is pretty hard to beat, and Wilson had similarly perceptive things to say about E. E. Cummings and, here, about early Wallace Stevens: ''Emotion seems to emerge only furtively in the cryptic images of his poetry, as if it had been driven, as he seems to hint, into the remotest crannies of sleep or disposed of by being dexterously converted into exquisite amusing words.''

Sometime in the late '40s, disillusioned, perhaps, by cold war politics and worn out by the dissolution of his quarrelsome and misguided marriage to Mary McCarthy, Wilson soured on contemporary writing. He became, in fact, a bit of a curmudgeon, and the great works of the second half of his career are on subjects like Civil War literature and the Dead Sea scrolls.

But these Library of America volumes of his earlier work display a more open and generous Wilson, and occasionally a more daring one. The prose is sometimes looser and brasher, before it had settled into the grand style that, as his friend John Dos Passos once said, ''fills the room in great coils.'' The young Wilson was eager to have his say about whatever was current. He liked Ring Lardner, Eugene O'Neill and Sherwood Anderson, and he loved D. H. Lawrence's ''Lady Chatterley's Lover,'' an early copy of which he pored over.

Correction: October 21, 2007, Sunday
An article on Oct. 7 about Edmund Wilson's inclusion in the Library of America misspelled the surname of an author whose works Wilson read as a teenager. It is Thomas Babington Macaulay, not Macauley.